by Bobbie Peers
Once they were all inside, Phil closed the door.
William looked around. They were standing on a sort of pier, which sloped down into the dark water. Large columns ran from the ceiling into the water.
“This is part of London’s old water supply,” Phil explained. “It’s nearly two hundred years old, from the Victorian era, to be completely precise.” Phil checked his watch. “Well, that’s enough of a history lesson. We don’t have much time.”
He pulled a small, round bathysphere no bigger than a rubber duck out of his pocket and carefully placed it in the water. As he let go of it, it stayed put, bobbing on the surface.
“Back up,” Phil said, and pointed his remote. A few seconds later the bathysphere in front of them was full-size.
William jumped because there was a sudden boom on the iron door behind them.
“They found us already?” Phil called out. “Irritating.”
The door boomed again.
“He’s coming in,” Iscia yelled.
“Wait a little,” Phil said, and started rooting through his pockets. He pulled out a little red double-decker London bus. “Good thing I didn’t leave everything back in the bunker.”
He hurried over to the iron door and set the London bus down in front of it. After taking several steps back, he pointed the remote control at the bus and pushed the button.
The little bus started shaking before it grew at a shocking rate. William and Iscia backed up until the edge of the water made them stop.
A full-size London bus stood before them now.
“That ought to hold him a little longer,” Phil said, and hurried over to the bathysphere. In a couple of bounds, he jumped onto its roof, bent down, and grabbed a round locking wheel. He turned the wheel and opened a hatch down into the bathysphere.
“In you go!” he called out.
William hurried over onto the bell and climbed through the round hatch. Iscia was right behind him. William turned and waited for Phil to climb in as well. But he was still standing on the outside.
“Aren’t you coming?” William asked.
“I have to stay here and keep him from getting in,” Phil responded. “You guys will figure it out. I’ll be along as soon as I can.”
William surveyed the inside of the bathysphere. There were two seats and a control panel. Large glass windows provided a view into the dark water.
“But we don’t know where we’re going,” William called back.
“Down!” Phil exclaimed. “Everything you need to know is in the manual.” He pointed to a book on a small table next to where William had just set the orbulator.
“And Emma . . . ?” William began, but was cut short by a substantial explosion out in the hall.
“Get out of here,” Phil yelled. “I don’t have time to explain. You’ll recognize Emma right away when you see her. She’ll take you to the Mariana Trench.”
Another powerful explosion shook the bathysphere, and Phil slammed the hatch closed over them.
32
William and Iscia sat for a moment, listening to the noises outside the bathysphere.
“Do you think Goffman made it through the door?” Iscia asked. She looked worried. “We shouldn’t leave Phil behind like this.”
“We have no choice,” William said. He picked up the manual from the little table. The cover said BATHYSPHERE MANUAL FOR TELEPORTATION in all caps. Underneath the title there was a picture of a bathysphere, like the one they were sitting in.
“Teleportation?” William mumbled. He opened the manual and started reading.
Two minutes later they were on their way down.
William sat at the controls, piloting the bathysphere into the abyss. After skimming through the manual, William had picked up the most important points: Push the handle forward to dive and pull it back to rise. Pretty simple, actually. The manual said they had to go down to a depth of fifteen hundred feet.
William glanced at the depth gauge on the control panel, which already registered a depth of more than three hundred feet.
“Who could Emma be?” Iscia mused, peering into the darkness outside.
In all the commotion, William had completely forgotten Emma.
“I have a feeling we’ll find out soon,” he said, pushing the handle even farther forward.
They continued their descent into the void. Everything was totally dark around them. The only indication that they were moving was the depth gauge. Soon it showed that they were at a depth of almost twelve hundred feet. There was still no sign they were going to reach the bottom.
“There’s something out there,” Iscia said excitedly, pointing out the window.
William looked in the direction she was pointing.
“I don’t see . . . ,” he began, but stopped when he noticed something glowing in the dark water.
At first it was just a dim light. Like a solitary little lightbulb floating in the water. Then the light grew clearer and larger. And as the light came closer, William noticed more lights, a string of them. It looked like there were hundreds of them, in all the colors of the rainbow. It was as if they were dancing in the darkness below them. The lights came closer and closer, until they covered the entire window.
“What is that?” he whispered.
He was staring at the undulating lights. There was something hypnotic about the way they moved. William felt his body going numb. He glanced at the depth gauge. It said they were more than fifteen hundred feet down. He didn’t know if it was the dancing lights or the pressure or both that was doing it, but he suddenly felt weak. And his head was tingling, as if he were about to faint.
“Do you feel that too?” he said, without taking his eyes off the lights.
“The tingling?” Iscia said. William could hear from her voice that she was also having trouble.
“Yes,” William said.
“You think it might have something to do with that?” she said, pointing at the control panel in front of them.
William forced himself to look away from the hypnotic lights outside.
There was a clocklike meter on the control panel that said OXYGEN on it. The arrow was approaching the red zone.
William suddenly realized what was making them so sluggish. “We’re running out of . . . air,” he said. His lungs hurt as he spoke.
“What do we do?” Iscia wheezed back. She sounded like she had asthma.
William couldn’t give up now. He had to fight. His eyes moved back to the control panel. They stopped at a switch that said SPOTLIGHTS.
William reached out and put his index finger on the switch. It was difficult to move, as if he were suspended in gelatin. And he was breathing like he’d just sprinted a fifty-yard race.
He pushed the button.
A hum started somewhere above them. And a powerful beam of light shot out into the darkness. If William had had more air in his lungs, he would have screamed at the sight facing him. Instead, he emitted only a weak gasp.
A colossal octopus was floating in the darkness outside the bathysphere. Its body was the size of a whole house. And the eight tentacles had to be as long as soccer fields.
But this was no normal octopus. It was covered in lights, all over its tentacles and its body. And only now did William realize that its body was made of some kind of metal.
“It’s an enormous robotic octopus,” William wheezed, his lungs burning from lack of air.
Iscia didn’t respond. William looked at the oxygen meter. The needle was almost completely at the bottom.
“Iscia?” William said. She still had her eyes open, but her breathing was labored.
William turned around, grabbed the control stick, and pulled it toward him.
“I’m going to get you up to the surface.”
William wasn’t willing to sacrifice Iscia, not for anything, not even for antiluridium.
Suddenly something banged into them. One of the massive tentacles coiled around the bathysphere and held them back. And in the colli
sion, the glass in front of William had cracked. A thin stream of water poured in.
William looked around the bathysphere in desperation. The immense tentacles outside squeezed harder, and he heard the glass beginning to give way.
Then he noticed it.
He leaned forward and studied the tentacle through the glass. Small electronic lights blinked at him, but that wasn’t what had caught William’s attention. It was a little metal plate attached to the end of the tentacle that said MODEL: EMMA 2000.
“Emma?” William said out loud to himself. “Are you Emma?”
“Did Phil send us down here just to get killed by a mechanical octopus?” Iscia suddenly gasped.
William jumped. “Welcome back.” He smiled wanly. “I’m trying to figure out what Emma here wants.”
He glanced down at the manual he was holding and opened it to the index. He ran his finger down the list until he came to the words he was looking for, the ones that began with the letter E.
Turning to the page he wanted, he said, “Listen!” Every word he said hurt, and it was hard to focus on the text in front of him. But he couldn’t give up now. They had to do this.
“Establish communication with teleported electro-octopi using radio waves. . . .”
After struggling his way through the rest of the instructions, William took the bathysphere’s radio in his hand. The speaker on the wall crackled. He turned a knob and tuned the radio to the correct wavelength. Suddenly the crackling went away, and pleasant elevator music poured out of the speaker.
William and Iscia exchanged looks.
“Is that a radio channel?” she gasped, her face pale. “Fast. There’s almost no air left.”
William checked the manual again. This was the right channel. William didn’t know what to expect, but this couldn’t be right. He was about to try tuning it some more when the music stopped, and a pleasant female voice came through the speaker.
“Welcome to Emma 2000,” it said. “The best way to travel. All you need to do is plot the coordinates for your destination, and Emma 2000 will take you the rest of the way.”
“Do you know the coordinates for the Mariana Trench?” William wheezed, looking at Iscia.
“No,” she said. “But I bet that does.” She leaned forward and tapped on a world atlas hanging on the wall. It said OCEANS OF THE WORLD in big blue letters on the cover.
“Can you find it?” William gasped, and glanced down at the oxygen level. The needle had hit red now.
Iscia hunted feverishly though the pages.
“We don’t have much time!” William coughed.
“Here it is,” she said. “Let’s see. Eleven degrees twenty-one minutes north.” She paused, breathing rapidly. “And one hundred forty-two degrees twelve minutes east.”
William entered the coordinates.
It was quiet for a moment. He felt the last remaining air leave his body. It hadn’t worked. Iscia slumped beside him. Then he heard the woman’s voice again: “Destination: the Pacific Ocean. Fasten your seat belts. We will teleport in ten, nine, eight, seven . . .”
William listened to the countdown. Iscia had collapsed again.
“Three, two, one . . .”
ZAP!
33
The bathysphere landed in the water with a tremendous splash.
William leaned over Iscia. He opened a porthole in the ceiling, and fresh air poured in. Iscia stirred. She took a deep breath and opened her eyes. “That was close,” William said.
Iscia shuddered and sat up. The bathysphere bobbed up and down a few times before it settled.
“Look over there,” Iscia cried, pointing out the window.
One of the mechanical tentacles slid off the top of the bell and down into the water. Through the thick glass, they could see the silhouette of the massive octopus as it continued down into the depths and disappeared with a flash of light.
“Do you think it’s teleporting back where we came from?” Iscia asked.
“Sure,” William said. “That must be where its base is.”
William and Iscia looked at each other for a long moment, and William knew they were thinking the same thing.
How were they going to go down into the trench in this little bathysphere? Phil had said they had to go all the way to the bottom. They were going to need a submarine for that, the one Phil had picked up down in the bunker.
William looked at the crack in the glass in front of him. The floor of the bathysphere was covered with water. He knew that even if they replaced the glass, the bathysphere had taken a beating and might not be able to handle the pressure down there. They could be crushed long before they reached the bottom.
“What do we do now?” Iscia asked, peering out the window.
Half of the bathysphere was underwater. A school of playful dolphins swam by in the bright blue water right in front of them.
William didn’t answer, not because he didn’t want to, but because he didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know how they could get down to the bottom, at least not with the equipment they had available.
“Well, we can’t just sit around up here moping,” William finally said. He stood up and opened the roof hatch. Salty marine air flooded in.
Not long after that, William and Iscia were sitting on the roof of the bathysphere. The waves lapped against the sides. If it weren’t for the stressful situation they found themselves in, it would have been an idyllic moment, something out of a travel brochure: the bright blue water, the sky, the warm sunshine.
“Is that land over there?” Iscia asked, pointing to the horizon.
“Don’t think so,” William replied.
Iscia’s gaze followed a school of fish.
They heard a tremendous splash behind them, and a large wave hit William, washing him right off the bathysphere and into the sea. He swallowed mouthfuls of water as he flailed his arms to get back to the surface. Finally William broke through the surface and gasped for air.
“William!” Iscia yelled.
He looked in the direction her voice had come from. She was clinging to the bathysphere. Something big and black was obscuring the sun.
It was an enormous submarine.
A hatch on the top of the submarine opened, and a figure popped out.
The figure raised its arm and waved. “Are you guys ready?”
34
“How did it go?” was the first thing William said after Phil had locked the submarine’s hatch.
William noticed a big gash on the back of Phil’s head. The android’s white puzzle-piece skin had been torn away, and the workings underneath were visible.
“Are you hurt?” Iscia said.
“Hm?” Phil said, looking over at her.
Iscia pointed to the gash on the back of his head. Phil felt around with his hand.
“Oh, it heals fast,” he said, flapping his hand a bit as if this were the most trivial thing in the world. “You should have seen me after the meteorite that did away with the dinosaurs.”
“So, how did it go?” William asked again.
“How did what go?” Phil replied, turning to face William.
“How did it go when you stayed behind in London just now?”
Phil stared blankly at William for a moment as if he had no idea what William was talking about. Then his eyes lit up.
“Oh . . . that. Yes, that went quite well,” he said, then pointed to a round hole in the floor in front of them.
“We have to get down there.” Phil climbed down the ladder that stuck up from the hole. He gestured for William and Iscia to follow him.
They entered the submarine’s control room. The walls around them were covered with knobs, meters, wires, and pipes. There was beeping and whirring and ticking.
Phil raised the periscope and looked through it. “Push that button,” he instructed, waving his hand at Iscia. “And, William, you’ll need to pull down the control lever when I give the word.”
He pointed to a lever sticking ou
t of the wall.
They followed Phil’s instructions, and the enormous submarine started to descend. It shuddered, creaked, and bubbled around them as thousands of tons of steel sank down into the dark depths.
“Are you sure that isn’t a problem?” Iscia asked, pointing at the gash on the back of Phil’s head.
Phil raised his hand and felt around. “Oops,” he said, and looked a little concerned. “I had totally forgotten about that.” He rolled up one jacket sleeve and pushed some buttons on a little control panel on his forearm.
Seconds later, the white skin dangling from his head wound began to fold its way upward, contracting. The gash grew smaller and smaller until the wound was gone.
“There,” Phil said with a smile. “All better.” He turned to the wall and started pulling levers and pushing buttons while muttering to himself. He turned on a screen that was mounted on the wall.
“They didn’t have screens back when this submarine was built, did they?” William asked.
“That’s right,” Phil said. “I had to install this one myself. It makes the job much easier.”
Phil leaned to the side and pushed a button on the wall, and pleasant jazz music filled the space from a small speaker beside the screen.
“You guys can relax for a bit now,” Phil said. “It’s a long way down.” He turned and left through a small iron door.
William sat down on the floor and leaned his back against the wall. Iscia sat down beside him.
They sat like this in silence for a while, listening to all the strange sounds that surrounded them. The beeping and ticking from the instruments. Menacing creaking sounds from the hull and the water that rushed past as the huge metal sub descended into the deep.
After some time had passed, William looked up at the depth meter. They were already halfway down to the bottom of the trench. The submarine dived quickly, and William’s ears and head had started to hurt. He could feel every heartbeat like a sledgehammer inside his head.
